Using History and Politics

Earlier this week, the Annenberg Center here in Philly ran a poll about the effectiveness of a few key political messages. Not just any messages, though. The Annenberg folks noted that both Kerry and Baby Bush are making use of historical comparisons, and so they asked people whether they had any idea what those historical references meant. The results raise some profound questions about the language of politics:

Baby Bush's team has made use of John Kerry's alleged association with "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, actress and anti-war activist. How effective is this tactic? Well, according to the poll results,

http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2004_03_herbert-hover_03-18_pr.pdf

40. percent remembered her Fonda a movie actress
20. percent remembered her as an antiwar leader
9. percent remembered her as Ted Turner's husband or Henry Fonda's daughter (what, no Peter Fonda's brother?)
11. percent gave answers that couldn't be classified. I don't know what that means.
17. percent didn't even have a realistic guess.

Obviously some people gave more than one answer.

So that suggests that Bush's efforts to tie Kerry to Jane Fonda are going to be either ineffective or counterproductive. Good news, right?

Well, check out a favorite Kerry team tactic of associating George Bush with Herbert Hoover, the last president to oversee a net loss in jobs.

43. percent said Hoover was president during the Depression
12. percent said he was an FBI director (whoops! wrong Hoover)
4. percent said he was a great dam in Nevada
3. percent said he invented the vacuum cleaner
8. percent said things that can't be classified
29. percent couldn't think of anything at all

As a historian and as someone who follows politics, I think these results pose some interesting questions and possibilities.

1. Targeted historical references probably still work. Some people, after all, got the Hanoi Jane references.
2. But politicians have to be careful, when aiming for a mass audience, not to assume much knowledge at all. When it works--when Reagan compared himself to John Winthrop, or Kennedy invoked the memories of the revolutionary generation--it gives stature and credibility to the candidate. It fills in the gaps in positive ways; it turns him into a much more powerful and likeable figure. The problem is deciding which references will work.
3. Since younger people know much less about history than their elders, it is possible that this line of talk has some role in keeping down young voters' interest. Why should they care about people who speak in what is essentially a private, coded language? The most successful candidate among young people that I've seen was Howard Dean, and he hardly referred to history at all.
4. What are the other possibilities for building a vivid symbolic language for politics? If history doesn't work, what will? What can be a common, communal language? This is, I think, an immensely complicated question, one much harder than we imagine. Politicians tend to go for fuzziness, relying upon broadly positive associations with children or soldiers. The language of service has animated some generations; Kennedy's call was, after all, rooted as much in World War II experiences as in liberal ideology. For all of Kerry's invocation of his military experience, Kerry doesn't seem to be interested in relying upon that military service language as a common referent. He talks about the military to tell us about himself, not to tell us about us.

In the past, politicians used two other vivid symbolic languages to arouse passion: religion and family, but those don't seem to work either.

So what is left? What language could possibly serve as a common referent? If not faith or family or 20th century history, what then? The easy answer is to say that there is no answer--we have many stories, we have no story. The other easy answer is to do what politicians do and to say our only common language is one of fuzzy goodness and (increasingly) self-indulgent happiness.

But I do think there is another language that people still largely share. A candidate who could frame himself as the constitution candidate--not by pandering to particular provisions but by dwelling in the images of constitution-making and country-building--could hope to speak a language that we all could understand.

The revolutionary generation that wrote the constitution and the Civil War generation that rewrote it are, perhaps, more present in people's minds than Herbert Hoover (or J. Edgar) or Jane Fonda or even FDR. It is strange to me that politicians--who make all kinds of pandering remarks about the greatness of the constitution--don't really take advantage of this, our only common language, to build on this point, and to tell us a story not only about who they are but, more importantly, about who we are.

The question I have (if you made it all the way down here) is what do you think Kerry can use as his inclusive, symbolic language?  What unites us?  What can he invoke and use to cloak himself in virtue?

If he can figure this out--and lots of successful politicians can't--he'll be a long way toward greatness, since the whole purpose of a field of language is that it makes the secondary choices that much simpler.

More on this topic at:
http://downstown.blogspot.com/2004_03_21_downstown_archive.html#108010669133087586